


Solve Everything

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored (Video Game), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 14:16:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You were about to ask how I knew you didn’t kill her. Every idiot with half a brain cell knows you didn’t kill her. Scalpel.” There is a man living in the attic of a Weeper building who knows exactly who he is behind the mask. Unfortunately, this man is quite mad. Dishonored/Sherlock Holmes crossover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solve Everything

**Author's Note:**

> I am most familiar with the RDJ-films and BBC-Sherlock versions of Holmes, so that's mostly what this version is based upon.

He’s in the upper floors of a boarded-up Weeper building, fingertips on the Heart to search out the familiar pulse of a whalebone charm. The rooms are close and tottering, walls listing toward the street, the entire structure falling into disrepair. There is no one alive left but him. Him, and the rats.

This is what he thinks.

He’s wrong.

He can sense (as the Heart whispers in his ear) the pull of several charms above – when a trapdoor in the ceiling opens, cleverly concealed, and a man with a mess of mad dark hair and no blood streaming from his eyes looks down.

“ _Finally_ ,” he sighs.

The “finally _what?_ ” that Corvo snaps back is by reflex; the “who are you?” that follows is indignant, sharp. But the man is already gone and he finds himself following him through the trapdoor and up into the attic –

The attic is most definitely not abandoned.

This is a Weeper building. There is red paint splashed on the walls, there are boarded up windows. There is no one living here. And there is this man living in the attic in a mess of clutter: skull on the mantelpiece, laboratory equipment, Lord Regent’s seal mapped out in bullets on the wall, facsimile of Solokov’s painting of the Outsider hanging upside-down with scribbles over half of it.

And the whalebone charms, a half-dozen of them, laid out in a neat circle on the floor.

And the incredibly obvious set of tripwires and traps set up around the whalebone charms.

And the man who set them, sitting on the floor, arms wrapped around an Overseer’s music box, puffing on a pipe and watching Corvo with the attitude of one taking notes.

“You are incredibly annoying person to track down, Corvo, did you know that?”

*****

“Of _course_ I live in Weeper buildings,” sighs Sherlock, as if Corvo has just asked _why do bullets hurt_. “Nobody comes to _check_. It’s difficult to pay rent when the Regent wants me dead.” He looks up from the dissection table and the almost-corpse of the rat that’s butterflied and twitching. “Don’t.”

“What?”

“You were about to ask how I knew you didn’t kill her. Every idiot with half a brain cell knows you didn’t kill her. Scalpel.”

“Blueprints.”

“Scalpel first.”

Corvo gives a put-upon sigh that echoes inside his mask and hands the Sherlock the scalpel. There is a silence of several seconds. The twitching of the rat on the table very much stops. There is a silence of several more seconds before Corvo clears his throat and Sherlock reaches under the table and hands him the floorplans of the Golden Cat.

“The westward window of the Smoking Room is sloppily boarded up,” Sherlock mutters. His tone is matter-of-fact. The organs of the rat are perfectly arranged under the knife, and then they are not. “Prudence doesn’t dare water down the brandy for them, so they will be perfectly drunk. The guard who’s in love with a maid can be bought. The steam room is faulty. Do have fun.”

*****

“The mask is unnecessary.”

“The mask is absolutely necessary.”

“The mask is unnecessary and ridiculous. The average guard knows it much better than he’ll ever know your face. Plus Piero’s lying to you, it doesn’t serve an anti-plague function at all. Drink Elixir and be done with it, you’ll see better.”

“Your hat is ridiculous.”

*****

A man who lives in a building marked for the dead produces things that the dead do not – smoke, food scraps, empty Elixir bottles. Sherlock is very careful in how he disposes of them. The Death-Counters do not come calling.

The Whalers, however, do.

“You’ve been _working_ for them?” Corvo shouts. He’s standing over the man sprawled on Sherlock’s carpet. Firelight glitters in the gas-mask glass of his eyes; it’s the only life left in him.  “What in the _Void_ possessed you to –”

As he calls on it, he can hear the Void whisper around him like music.

Corvo _moves_ , the mark on his hand flaring bright, and times slows to a crawl as the blade shears out of the shadows and _stops_ a handsbreath away from Sherlock’s throat. It is nothing to blink behind the gas-masked man and open his throat with a blade of his own; it is nothing, and everything, and the _sound_ that Sherlock makes when time starts again and the spray of hot blood hits his back is almost enough to make Corvo feel a bit sorry for him. The man yowls like a _cat_.

“You stopped time,” he’s gasping moments later, excitement pitching his voice high as he finds a rag and furiously wipes the cooling blood from the back of his neck. “No – slowed, not stopped, several times slower than normal and clearly your own timestream was not affected but that still doesn’t solve the translocation –“

“Sherlock,” Corvo spits, gesturing with his sword to the bodies piled neatly in the corner and just as neatly stripped of valuables. “You’ve been _working_ for them.”

“…Worked.” Sherlock pauses for the space of a breath. His eyes do the briefest flick to the rag, the wet red. “Worked. Past tense.”

The firelight is very _dark_ in Sherlock’s eyes, and perhaps this is what makes Corvo hazard a guess. He feels his mouth curve into a smirk at the thought, bitter as sea-salt. “Boredom?”

“Boredom.”

*****

Corvo is not surprised (after _you stopped time_ ; after the careful measurements of the back of his hand with Sherlock _vibrating_ with something so like an electrical charge that Corvo had been afraid of touching  him) to find that the attic room is soon painted over and over with copies and variations of his Mark.

In answer, he steals Solokov’s journals and leaves them on Sherlock’s bedside when the man isn’t home. He dog-ears the page that describes each and every one of Solokov’s attempts to summon the Outsider, and each and every one of his failures.

He realizes (on a rooftop halfway across the city with the rain pelting over his uncovered face) that Sherlock will consider this a _challenge_ , and that it was likely a singularly bad idea.

*****

There are rats in all three stories below.

(There is an elaborate set of traps and countermeasures to _keep_ them all three stories below, but this is beside the point. Corvo notes, eyebrows raised, that the traps contain rather more explosives than is necessary.)

“How do  you live like this?” he asks.

Sherlock’s nose wrinkles. He shuts off the audiograph recorder, but the rant of _you ruined my entry on the effects of human blood on whale oil, Corvo, I’ll have to start over_ is thankfully unvoiced _._ “I had a partner,” he says.

His voice is short. Utterly blank.

“Past tense?” guesses Corvo, after a moment.

“He was a doctor."

Down below, there is a squeak – and then an almighty _thunder_ as the traps come to life and explode and catch an entire swarm on fire.

*****

“I have two things for you,” announces Sherlock the instant he enters, and Corvo sits down with eyebrows jumped high to his hairline. The man has _things_ for him often, yes - theories and insults and bits of news – but this _things_ almost sounds like the word _gifts._

It’s not like he needs more gifts tonight, really. Not with the spatter of Hiram Burrows’s blood on his coat. (Sherlock’s seen it already, he knows, and could probably tell the story of the man’s death back to him without pausing for breath, twitches and all).

Corvo watches the man reach under his workbench and pull out a bottle of Serkonin wine. He recognizes the label, instantly. Of course. It occurs to him that his friend has been planning this for a long while.

It occurs to him that he is learning to read people the way that Sherlock does; and what he can read in the lines of Sherlock’s shoulders and the whiteness of his fingers on the bottle is that this is deadly serious.

“First,” says Sherlock, the sound of the cork popping loud in the little room, “your favorite.”

Corvo smiles. The smile is strained. Sherlock can see the strain, and the look on his face would be a meaningless twitch on another man but on him it means _approval_.

“And second?” Corvo asks.

The glass is cool as ice as it passes hand to hand. Cool as winter, or rationality, or rational betrayal. Sherlock pauses before he speaks.

“Make sure this is the only thing you drink tonight. And make sure you get Emily out of there right away.”


End file.
